The attack in Kafr Dan, near Jenin, comes as the Israeli military steps up its deadly attacks in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces killed six Palestinians during an attack on the village of Kafr Dan near Jenin in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, as Israel steps up its attacks on the territory amid the war in Gaza.
An Israeli special forces unit entered the village on Tuesday and besieged a house before shelling it, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
The six murdered men were between 21 and 32 years old, according to the Ministry of Health. One of them, Ahmad Smoudi, was the brother of a 12-year-old child who was shot dead by Israeli forces in Jenin in 2022.
The Jenin battalion of the al-Quds Brigades – the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad – had said on Tuesday that it was involved in “fierce” fighting with Israeli troops in Kafr Dan.
The Israeli military claimed to have carried out a “counterterrorism” operation in the village, killing four armed Palestinians. The army added that it used attack helicopters in the attack and suffered no casualties.
Israeli forces killed four Palestinians west of Ramallah on Monday and three others in Jenin on Friday.
The Israeli military has regularly conducted deadly attacks in the West Bank over the past few years – a trend that has increased with the start of the war in Gaza.
According to Palestinian health authorities, Israel has killed 544 Palestinians, including 133 children, in the West Bank since October 2023, when violence broke out in Gaza. Israel also detained thousands of Palestinians during this period.
Palestinians in the West Bank have also faced violent attacks from Israeli settlers, who have attacked farmers and invaded Palestinian towns in recent months, often under the protection of the Israeli military.
Rawhi Fattouh, Palestinian National Council, said Israeli attacks in the West Bank were a “continuation of the massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
“This racist [Israeli] The government is trying by all means to detonate the situation in the West Bank and the region and transform the conflict into a religious and ideological struggle that would lead the region into a furnace of violence, slaughter and massacres,” Fattouh said in a statement.
He called on the international community to intervene and “end this madness”.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
